Wednesday, March 29, 2017

Stand Against Religious Bigotry, Defend
Democratic Rights of all Citizens of India

Press Release

March 29, 2017

People's Alliance for Democracy and
Secularism (PADS) condemns the murder of rationalist H. Farook in Coimbatore,
Tamilnadu on March 16, 2017. Farook was a member of Dravidar Viduthalai
Kazhagam (Dravidian Freedom Organisation) which is inspired by the rationalist
ideas of Periyar.

According to the police, the six men who
killed Farook were self-radicalised and 'claimed that their radical thought had
justified the murder of a Muslim who had deviated from faith and they are proud
of what they had done'. After Dr. Dabholkar, Com Govind Pansare
and Professor Kalburgi, Farook is the fourth rationalist who has been
murdered by the so called champions of religion. On the same day, i.e. March 16
Prof Narendra Nayak, the president of Indian Federation of Rationalist
Associations was threatened with assault in Bangalore.

On March 19 in Jaipur a group of gau
rakshaks led by one Sadhvi Kamal Didi vandalised a hotel and assaulted
its staff claiming that it served beef. This violence occurred in the presence
of the police. A repeat of Dadri violence last year was narrowly averted. In UP
a number of meat shops have been burnt down by vigilante mobs after Mahant
Adityanath Yogi’s administration sealed a number of abbatoirs. While it is
beyond dispute that economic activity should be regulated, why have only these
two activities been targeted, and what right to mobs have to attack any shop?

These are some of the latest instances of
increasing violence in the name of religion in India. In fact, all of South Asia has become a battleground
for religious fanatics hell-bent upon subjugating citizens'
freedoms via violence and killings.

Dissent from orthodoxy is a feature of
religious history and is responsible for religious reform. Such dissent has
also contributed to the growth of humanist and democratic values, which are the
guiding principles of the Indian constitution and underlie the fundamental
rights of all citizens. These rights include the freedom of conscience, the
freedom of believers to profess and practice their religion, and also the freedom
of non-believers to lead a life of dignity with their agnosticism or atheism.

However, state authorities often disregard
constitutional provisions. Rather than upholding the citizens’ freedom to lead
a life of their choice, including the right to eat food of their choice, police
and judicial system routinely penalise citizens for 'hurting religious
sentiments' of one or the other community. The murderers of Dabholkar, Panasare and
Kalburgi are still at large, and their political patrons have suffered no damage. In Jaipur police sealed a hotel on a
mere allegation, while the FIR for violence on hotel staff does not even
mention the sadhavi who led the mob.

Violence in
the name of religion will not lead to any golden age. The consequences of
religious authoritarianism are visible in Pakistan. The Hindutva brigade is
cultivating a similar scenario in India. It wants to attack or threaten all
those who disagree with its ideas or diktats. Political parties must realise
that their existence depends upon the constitutionally guaranteed rights of
Indian citizens. The cultivation of religious aggression is sheer opportunism;
and prepares the ground for the sabotage of democracy by authoritarian forces.

P.A.D.S.
appeals to all Indians, irrespective of their religious beliefs, creed, or
caste to stand against communal hatred and violence. The people committing or
instigating this violence may appear to be targeting only rationalists and
minorities today. In actual fact they are enemies of democracy and freedom. All
of us who value our constitutional rights must unite to defeat such forces.
P.A.D.S. demands that state authorities stop collaborating with hooligans and
vigilante mobs, and fulfil their sworn duty to protect the lives, property and
civil liberties of all citizens.

Foucault’s argument
that knowledge is historically contingent must itself be historically
contingent, and one wonders why Derrida bothered to explain the infinite
malleability of texts at such length if I could read his entire body of work
and claim it to be a story about bunny rabbits

Those who are obsessed by language finally come to the conviction that there is nothing but interpretation: Stanley Rosen in Hermeneutics as Politics

Postmodernism, most
simply, is an artistic and philosophical movement which began in France in the
1960s and produced bewildering art and even more bewildering “theory.” It
drew on avant-garde and surrealist art and earlier philosophical ideas,
particularly those of Nietzsche and Heidegger, for its anti-realism and
rejection of the concept of the unified and coherent individual. It reacted
against the liberal humanism of the modernist artistic and intellectual
movements, which its proponents saw as naïvely universalizing a western,
middle-class and male experience.

It rejected philosophy
which valued ethics, reason and clarity with the same accusation.
Structuralism, a movement which (often over-confidently) attempted to analyze
human culture and psychology according to consistent structures of
relationships, came under attack. Marxism, with its understanding of society
through class and economic structures was regarded as equally rigid and simplistic.
Above all, postmodernists attacked science and its goal of attaining objective
knowledge about a reality which exists independently of human perceptions which
they saw as merely another form of constructed ideology dominated by bourgeois,
western assumptions. Decidedly left-wing, postmodernism had both a nihilistic
and a revolutionary ethos which resonated with a post-war, post-empire
zeitgeist in the West. As postmodernism continued to develop and diversify, its
initially stronger nihilistic deconstructive phase became secondary (but still
fundamental) to its revolutionary “identity politics” phase.

It has been a matter
of contention whether postmodernism is a reaction against modernity. The
modern era is the period of history which saw Renaissance Humanism, the
Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution and the development of liberal values
and human rights; the period when Western societies gradually came to value
reason and science over faith and superstition as routes to knowledge, and
developed a concept of the person as an individual member of the human race
deserving of rights and freedoms rather than as part of various collectives
subject to rigid hierarchical roles in society.

The Encyclopaedia
Britannica says postmodernism “is largely a reaction against the
philosophical assumptions and values of the modern period of Western
(specifically European) history” whilst the Stanford Encyclopaedia of
Philosophy denies this and says “Rather, its differences lie within
modernity itself, and postmodernism is a continuation of modern thinking in
another mode.” I’d suggest the difference lies in whether we see modernity in
terms of what was produced or what was destroyed. If we see the essence of
modernity as the development of science and reason as well as humanism and
universal liberalism, postmodernists are opposed to it. If we see modernity as
the tearing down of structures of power including feudalism, the Church,
patriarchy, and Empire, postmodernists are attempting to continue it, but their
targets are now science, reason, humanism and liberalism. Consequently, the
roots of postmodernism are inherently political and revolutionary, albeit in a
destructive or, as they would term it, deconstructive way.

The term “postmodern”
was coined by Jean-François Lyotard in his 1979 book, The Postmodern
Condition. He defined the postmodern condition as “an incredulity
towards metanarratives.” A metanarrative is a wide-ranging and cohesive
explanation for large phenomena. Religions and other totalizing ideologies are
metanarratives in their attempts to explain the meaning of life or all of
society’s ills. Lyotard advocated replacing these with “mininarratives” to get
at smaller and more personal “truths.” He addressed Christianity and Marxism in
this way but also science.

******

Michel Foucault’s work
is also centered on language and relativism although he applied this to history
and culture. He called this approach “archeology” because he saw himself as
“uncovering” aspects of historical culture through recorded discourses (speech
which promotes or assumes a particular view). For Foucault, discourses control
what can be “known” and in different periods and places, different systems of
institutional power control discourses. Therefore, knowledge is a direct product
of power. “In any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only
one ‘episteme’ that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge,
whether expressed in theory or silently invested in a practice.”

Furthermore, people
themselves were culturally constructed. “The individual, with his identity and
characteristics, is the product of a relation of power exercised over bodies,
multiplicities, movements, desires, forces.” He leaves almost no room for
individual agency or autonomy. As Christopher Butler says, Foucault “relies on
beliefs about the inherent evil of the individual’s class position, or
professional position, seen as ‘discourse’, regardless of the morality of his
or her individual conduct.” He presents medieval feudalism and modern liberal
democracy as equally oppressive, and advocates criticizing and attacking
institutions to unmask the “political violence that has always exercised itself
obscurely through them.”

We see in Foucault the
most extreme expression of cultural relativity read through structures of power
in which shared humanity and individuality are almost entirely absent. Instead,
people are constructed by their position in relation to dominant cultural ideas
either as oppressors or oppressed. Judith Butler drew on Foucault for her
foundational role in queer theory focusing on the culturally constructed nature
of gender, as did Edward Said in his similar role in post-colonialism and
“Orientalism” and Kimberlé Crenshaw in her development of “intersectionality”
and advocacy of identity politics. We see too the equation of language with
violence and coercion and the equation of reason and universal liberalism with oppression.

It was Jacques Derrida
who introduced the concept of “deconstruction,” and he too argued for cultural
constructivism and cultural and personal relativity. He focused even more
explicitly on language. Derrida’s best-known pronouncement “There is no
outside-text” relates to his rejection of the idea that words refer to anything
straightforwardly. Rather, “there are only contexts without any center of
absolute anchoring.”

***********

The logical problem of
self-referentiality has been pointed out to postmodernists by philosophers
fairly constantly but it is one they have yet to address convincingly. As
Christopher Butler points out, “the plausibility of Lyotard’s claim for the
decline of metanarratives in the late 20th century ultimately depends upon an
appeal to the cultural condition of an intellectual minority.” In other words,
Lyotard’s claim comes directly from the discourses surrounding him in his
bourgeois academic bubble and is, in fact, a metanarrative towards which he is
not remotely incredulous.

Equally, Foucault’s argument that knowledge is
historically contingent must itself be historically contingent, and one wonders
why Derrida bothered to explain the infinite malleability of texts at such
length if I could read his entire body of work and claim it to be a story about
bunny rabbits with the same degree of authority.

This is, of course,
not the only criticism commonly made of postmodernism. The most glaring problem
of epistemic cultural relativity has been addressed by philosophers and
scientists. The philosopher, David Detmer, in Challenging
Postmodernism, says

“Consider this
example, provided by Erazim Kohak, ‘When I try, unsuccessfully, to squeeze a tennis
ball into a wine bottle, I need not try several wine bottles and several tennis
balls before, using Mill’s canons of induction, I arrive inductively at the
hypothesis that tennis balls do not fit into wine bottles’… We are now in a
position to turn the tables on [postmodernist claims of cultural relativity]
and ask, ‘If I judge that tennis balls do not fit into wine bottles, can you
show precisely how it is that my gender, historical and spatial location,
class, ethnicity, etc., undermine the objectivity of this judgement?”

However, he has not
found postmodernists committed to explaining their reasoning and describes a
bewildering conversation with postmodern philosopher, Laurie Calhoun,

“When I had
occasion to ask her whether or not it was a fact that giraffes are taller than
ants, she replied that it was not a fact, but rather an article of religious
faith in our culture.”

Physicists Alan Sokal
and Jean Bricmont address the same problem from the perspective of science in Fashionable
Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science:

“Who could now
seriously deny the ‘grand narrative’ of evolution, except someone in the grip
of a far less plausible master narrative such as Creationism? And who would
wish to deny the truth of basic physics? The answer was, ‘some
postmodernists.’”

and

“There is something
very odd indeed in the belief that in looking, say, for causal laws or a
unified theory, or in asking whether atoms really do obey the laws of quantum
mechanics, the activities of scientists are somehow inherently ‘bourgeois’ or
‘Eurocentric’ or ‘masculinist’, or even ‘militarist.'”

the Global Seed Vault on the Svalbard
archipelago (is) part of a frigid cluster of islands far north of Norway where polar
bears outnumber human residents. It’s a destination I first
discovered in Lauren Redniss’ remarkable illustrated study of weather, Thunder
and Lightning. There, she writes, you’ll find the vault, a
reinforced and heavily secured tunnel, built into a frozen mountain. It
contains hundreds of thousands of unique samples of agricultural crops and
serves as a backup repository for seeds from more local vaults around the
world. The collection is so inclusive that, as of 2016, virtually every country
was represented within.

In photographs, the vault’s exterior is strikingly
beautiful, thanks in large part to the haunting crystalline light installation
by Dyveke Sanne above the entrance. When Redniss draws the vault, though, she
emphasizes just how small it is, a tiny gray wedge emerging out of the endless
white expanse of the mountain. It’s an image of resilience in the face of
almost overwhelming odds, a reminder that, much as our species is capable of
self-annihilation, we somehow incline toward survival.

Sometimes, kept awake
by my work, I would tell myself stories of Svalbard. They always began the
same: Long after the fall of industrial civilization, an adventurer would
discover mention of the Seed Vault in the ruins of an ancient library.
Gathering a ragtag crew and building a makeshift longship, she would sail
north, in search of treasures that might help her people learn to farm again.
Along the way, she would battle pirates and dodge errant ice flows. My
adventurer never arrived at the vault: The mere knowledge that it was there,
that she was traveling toward it, was reassuring enough to lull me asleep.

I’m hardly alone in
imagining Svalbard as a source of optimism. As Redniss notes, this remote
locale is sometimes described as a “doomsday vault,” a buffer against our own
radical fragility. One representative CNN report on the site from 2015
frames it in these very terms, calling it “our insurance policy” and quoting a
source who claims that it would allow us to “recreate agriculture in the
world.” A more recent Gizmodo article, similarly, discusses a
new deposit to the vault under the headline, “Scientists Add 50,000 Seeds to Arctic Doomsday Vault Because
Everything Is Awful.”

Such language is
understandable: Redniss quotes a 2008 statement from the vault’s parent
institutions holding that its contents would remain frozen for 200 years even
in the event of “worst-case scenarios for global warming.” Heavily reinforced
as it is, it also seems like the sort of place that could survive more violent
conflicts too—in the unlikely event that any battle found its way that far
north. The project’s progenitor, agriculturalist Cary Fowler, notes in the
conclusion to his book Seeds
on Ice that he’s sometimes asked whether the facility could
endure a nuclear blast. “My glib answer to such questions is that it depends on
how big the bomb is,” he writes. “Tellingly, no depositor, scientist,
journalist, or politician who has ever gone down into the Seed Vault has
emerged to question the safety of its contents.”

Though such facts are
reassuring, the Svalbard vault was never really designed to support life after
the end—at least not in the singular, definitive sense that “the end” suggests.
As Fowler stresses in Seeds
on Ice, the vault was envisioned not out of an obsession with
“doomsday” but in a more “pragmatic” spirit. It exists in an ongoing
relationship with scores of local seed vaults around the globe, helping them
protect their critical contents against the risk of more regional and immediate
disasters: floods, power failures, violent uprisings, and so on… read more:

Consumerism plays a
massive role in climate change—all those fossil fuels we have to burn to make
and ship our stuff, all those trees cut down to make way for expanding cities
and businesses, all that livestock that sate our increasing appetites for
burgers and steak. But the environmental impact that all of our material goods
have on the planet goes far beyond the greenhouse gases emitted in the process
of creating and transporting these things.

In fact, much of it
has to do with what we leave behind. It’s a manmade phenomenon so massive that
that earth scientists suggest it’s creating a distinct geological layer upon the Earth made
up of technofossils. Most people associate geological layers with eras long
gone: paleontologists digging up fossils of stegosauruses or ancient corals,
the stunning layered lines of the Grand Canyon giving testimony to the billions
of years of life on Earth. But we’re creating our own coating on the planet
that will outlast us. Just as dinosaur bones and petrified wood persist, so too
will markers of our time, and they increasingly include the nonorganic.
Couches, ballpoint pens, garage doors, safety pins, zip drives, plastic water
bottles, cars, buildings - almost anything that’s not recycled has the potential
to fossilize - that is, partially or entirely preserved over time due to burial
in the earth or within layers of other fossils - think landfill. There are almost
certainly numerous future technofossils in front of you right now.

More than just
creating a geological mille feuilleof our past,
scientists warn that this phenomenon is also making a deep impact on our
terrestrial future. And like the Anthropocene—another
buzzword popular in the Earth sciences community used to mark a new geological
epoch in which human influence became the dominant force on Earth—it represents
a profound change.

According to a
conservative geological estimate from a team of international researchers led
by the University of Leicester, all this stuff weighs 30 trillion tons. That’s 110 pounds—the
weight of a semi-truck’s tire—for every square meter of the earth’s surface.
The group also calculated that the sheer diversity of the types of
technofossils we as a species have made—it already exceeds the number of biotic
species living on Earth now, and may even “exceed the total biological
diversity through Earth’s history.”.. read more:

Appeal to Observe 4th/5th April as All-India & International Day of Protest

Free the Maruti Workers!

Comrades,

You are aware of the repression on us by the nexus of Company management-Police-Government, as 13 MSWU members have been sentenced to Life Imprisonment and 4 more workers handed 5 years by the Gurgaon Sessions Court on 18 March 2017 – without a shred of evidence, and solely on the false witness accounts by the management.

The MSWU body members have been targeted because they have been the leadership of the struggle since 2011 against illegal contract worker system and for Trade Union rights and dignity of labour. It is a ‘class attack’ as in the words of Maruti CEO RC Bhargava. All workers know that this manifestly unjust verdict is to ‘teach a lesson’ to us by those in power that we should not fight for our rights and dignity on the shop-floor and beyond.

But against this repression, thousands of workers in this industrial belt and across India and world are protesting. On the evening of the Verdict on 18th May, 30000 workers in Gurgaon-Manesar did tool down strike against the injustice. The Maruti Suzuki Mazdoor Sangh (MSMS)–the joint platform of Maruti Suzuki factories–had given a call for Protest on the martyrdom day of Bhagat Singh-Rajguru-Sukhdev on 23rd March in Manesar. Despite prohibitory orders of Section 144, thousands of workers from the industrial belts in Haryana and Rajasthan rallied in protest from factory after factory in Manesar. A letter from the Jailed workers was read out, and a call given to intensify the struggle for the release of the Jailed workers. It was also decided to give economic assistance to families of the Jailed workers.

On this 23rd March Protest program, we already appealed to all to observe 4th April as an all-India Day and International of Protest. Preparations for the same have already begun in various places. Meanwhile, recognized Central Trade Unions later issued a call to organize all-India Protest in solidarity with the Maruti Suzuki workers on 5th April. So, We appeal to all workers and pro-worker forces to observe 4th/5th April 2017 as all-India and International Days of Protest and show solidarity in whatever ways possible.

The struggling workers in the Gurgaon-Manesar-Bawal-Neemrana industrial belt in the states of Haryana-Rajasthan are showing that they will not relent on their legitimate rights and strengthen their class unity against the capitalist onslaught. We have also received great courage and thank the amazing show of solidarity of workers with the struggle for Justice of Maruti workers. Since the last few days, there have been protests by lakhs of workers in this and other industrial belts and by various workers, student-youth, human rights and other democratic organizations in over 30 cities-towns in the country. We also greatly encouraged and thank the amazing show of international working class solidarity with protests, deputations and solidarity positions and actions in over 21 countries. This is a long battle, and only the growing force of the movement and wider solidarity can take the struggle forward.

Monday, March 27, 2017

For a man who made
such a powerful intervention in the history of the 20th century, many of
Mahatma Gandhi’s ideas were misunderstood during his lifetime. Sudhir Chandra’sGandhi:
An Impossible Possibility, translated from Hindi by Chitra
Padmanabhan draws our attention to
Gandhi’s last years, particularly the marked change in his understanding of the
acceptance of non-violence by Indians. It points to a startling discovery
Gandhi made in the years preceding India’s Independence and Partition: the
struggle for freedom which he had all along believed to be non-violent was in
fact not so. Calling for a serious rethink on the very nature and foundation of
modern India, this book throws new light on Gandhian philosophy and its
far-reaching implications for the world today. Excerpted below is a section
from the book in which Gandhi’s voice reaches out to our times with renewed
urgency.

Gandhi…had wanted to
avoid the country’s partition. Failing in that he engaged himself in preventing
the division of hearts, emphasising that even as the country had been divided,
the hearts must not be divided. Also knowing that if the hearts had not been
divided, the country could never have been divided and contending with this
paradox, because he understood that neither India nor Pakistan stood to gain in
the absence of mutual friendship. Should one become hell, the other can never
be heaven.

Seventy years have
since gone by. In the meantime, the division of hearts has perhaps deepened in
both countries – across the border and within the border as well. People’s
hearts have experienced new divisions. Gandhi’s warning has assumed greater
relevance today compared to earlier periods.

But only if we are
able to see, which is not easy. And when people cannot see, saying or doing
something to reach out to them becomes that much more difficult. Why was Gandhi running
in his old age from pillar to post? To be immortalised in history? To save the
Hindus and the Sikhs from the Muslims? To save the Muslims from the Sikhs and
the Hindus? Or to save humans from humans, by saving their humanity for them?…

Gandhi’s helplessness
was such that he was reduced to admonishing everybody by turn because everybody
was succumbing to the prevailing frenzy. He knew, and was repeatedly saying so,
that between the Hindus and Muslims [both of whom had become animals] for one
to refrain from becoming an animal is the only straight way to get out of this
violence. But no one was ready to heed him, to refrain from becoming an animal.
When he admonished the Hindus and the Sikhs, he was told to see what the
Muslims in Pakistan were doing, and also that the Muslims staying on in India
were traitors. Gandhi would listen attentively and respond publicly. But such
had become people’s mentality in the midst of that collective hysteria that
Gandhi’s slightest concern for the Muslims seemed like outright favouritism to
the Hindus and Sikhs, and when he criticised the Muslims or gave them advice,
he was disregarded….

…Along with
humanity,Gandhi laid stress on civic responsibility in a democracy:

Had man not become so
ruthless as to commit atrocities against his brother, these thousands of men,
women and innocent children [in refugee camps] would not have been so helpless,
and in many cases hungry. . . . Was all of this inescapable? A strong voice came
from within me: ‘No’. Is this the first fruit of a month of independence?. . .
Have the citizens of Delhi become mad? Do they not have even a shred of
humanity left in them? Does the love for their country and its independence not
appeal to them at all? I may be forgiven for putting the blame primarily on the
Hindus and the Sikhs. Can they not be worthy as humans to halt this tide of
hatred? I would strongly urge Delhi’s Muslims to let go of their fear, put
their trust in God and surrender all their firearms to the government. Because
the Hindus and the Sikhs are afraid that the Muslims possess firearms, it does
not mean that they do not have weapons of their own. It is only a question of
degree. Some may have less, some more. To obtain justice, the minorities will
either have to depend on God or on the human created by Him, or they will have
to depend on their guns, pistols and other weapons to protect themselves
against those whom they do not trust.

My advice is firm and
unchanging. Its truth is self-evident.

Have confidence in
your government that it will protect every citizen from those who commit
injustice, no matter how many more and superior weapons they may have. . . . By
their actions the people of Delhi will only make the task of seeking justice
from the Pakistan government difficult. Those who want justice will have to do
justice. They should be guiltless and true. Let the Hindus and Sikhs take the
rightful step and ask the Muslims who have been chased out of their homes to
return.

If the Hindus and
Sikhs have the courage in every way to take this rightful step, the refugee
problem will become very easy to handle. Then not only Pakistan but the whole
world will acknowledge their claims. They will save Delhi and India from
disgrace and destruction.

‘Those who want
justice will have to do justice.’ This was not mere idealism. Gandhi was
providing a formula for a viable morality.

In any civilised
society, said Gandhi, if avenging ill-will is considered proper, it can be done
so only through the agency of the government, certainly not through individual
interventions….

Gandhi believed that
if the safety of the Muslims was assured in India, he would be able to go to
Pakistan and do a great deal for the minorities there. [H]e said:

What shall we do about
the Muslims who have left? I have stated that we will not bring them back right
now. We will certainly not bring them back by means of the police and military.
We will bring them back only when the Hindus and Sikhs tell them, you are our
friends, please return to your homes, you don’t require the military or police,
we are your military, we are your police, all of us will live as brothers. If
we are able to accomplish this in Delhi I assure you that our way will become
absolutely clear in Pakistan. And with that will commence a new life. When I go
to Pakistan I will not let them off easily. I will die for the Hindus and Sikhs
there. I would be happy to die there. I would be happy to die here, too. If
what I say cannot be achieved here, then I must die.

That a new life should
commence was Gandhi’s desire. He was desiring this amid the barbarity of 1947.
It was either this or else a vow of self-annihilation... read more:

This year marks the
25th anniversary of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last
Man (1992). Rarely read but often denigrated, it might be
the most maligned, unfairly dismissed and misunderstood book of the post-war
era. Which is unfortunate for at least one reason: Fukuyama might have done a
better job of predicting the political turmoil that engulfed Western
democracies in 2016 – from Brexit, to Trump, to the Italian Referendum – than
anybody else.

This should sound
surprising. After all, Fukuyama’s name has for more than two decades been
synonymous with a fin-de-siècle Western triumphalism.
According to the conventional wisdom, he is supposed to have claimed that the
collapse of the communist regimes in eastern Europe and the United States’
victory in the Cold War meant that liberal capitalist democracy was
unambiguously the best form of human political organisation possible. To his
popular critics – sometimes on the Right, but most especially on the Left – The
End of History was thus a pseudo-intellectual justification for a
hyper-liberal capitalist ideology, whose high-water mark was the disastrous
administration of George W Bush. Fukuyama’s tagline – ‘the end of history’
– was seized upon by critics as proof that he was attempting to legitimate
neoconservative hubris, cloaking a pernicious ideology with the façade of
inevitability.

But (the conventional
wisdom continues) hubris was soon followed by nemesis: the 9/11 attacks and the
subsequent disaster of the Iraq War showed how wrong any triumphalist vision of
liberal-capitalist world order was. Fukuyama took particularly heavy flak in
this regard. Francis Wheen, in How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World (2004),
was typical when he accused Fukuyama of being a shill for neo-con interests. In
reply to the question ‘How do you get ahead by boldly making one of the worst
predictions in social science?’ Wheen sniped: ‘If you are going to be wrong, be
wrong as ostentatiously and extravagantly as possible.’ He claimed that
Fukuyama ‘understood what was required to titillate the jaded palate of the
chattering classes’ – and played on this for personal gain.

The rise of populism
has rattled the global political establishment. Brexit came as a
shock, as did the victory of Donald Trump. Much
head-scratching has resulted as leaders seek to work out why large chunks of
their electorates are so cross.

The answer seems
pretty simple. Populism is the result of economic failure. The 10 years since
the financial crisis have shown that the system of economic governance which
has held sway for the past four decades is broken. Some call this approach neoliberalism.
Perhaps a better description would be unpopulism. Unpopulism meant
tilting the balance of power in the workplace in favour of management and
treating people like wage slaves. Unpopulism was rigged to ensure that the
fruits of growth went to the few not to the many. Unpopulism decreed that those
responsible for the global financial crisis got away with it while those who
were innocent bore the brunt of austerity.

Anybody seeking to
understand why Trump won the US presidential election should take a look at
what has been happening to the division of the economic spoils. The share of
national income that went to the bottom 90% of the population held steady at
around 66% from 1950 to 1980. It then began a steep decline, falling to just
over 50% when the financial crisis broke in 2007.

Similarly, it is no
longer the case that everybody benefits when the US economy is doing well.
During the business cycle upswing between 1961 and 1969, the bottom 90% of
Americans took 67% of the income gains. During the Reagan expansion two decades
later they took 20%. During the Greenspan housing bubble of 2001 to 2007, they
got just two cents in every extra dollar of national income generated while the
richest 10% took the rest.

The US economist
Thomas Palley says that up until the late 1970s countries operated a virtuous
circle growth model in which wages were the engine of demand growth. “Productivity
growth drove wage growth which fueled demand growth. That promoted full
employment, which provided the incentive to invest, which drove further
productivity growth,” he says.

Unpopulism was touted
as the antidote to the supposedly failed policies of the postwar era. It
promised higher growth rates, higher investment rates, higher productivity
rates and a trickle down of income from rich to poor. It has delivered none of
these things.

James Montier and
Philip Pilkington, of the global investment firm GMO, say that the system which
arose in the 1970s was characterised by four significant economic policies: the
abandonment of full employment and its replacement with inflation targeting; an
increase in the globalisation of the flows of people, capital and trade; a
focus on shareholder maximisation rather than reinvestment and growth; and the pursuit
of flexible labour markets and the disruption of trade unions and workers’
organisations.

To take just the last
of these four pillars, the idea was that trade unions and minimum wages were
impediments to an efficient labour market. Collective bargaining and statutory
pay floors would result in workers being paid more than the market rate, with the
result that unemployment would inevitably rise… read more:

Thursday, March 23, 2017

Ukraine accused Russia of
“state terrorism” after a former Russian lawmaker and key witness in a
treason case against former leader Viktor Yanukovich was shot dead in broad
daylight outside a hotel in central Kiev on Thursday. Russia called the
allegation “absurd.”

Former MP Denis
Voronenkov was killed by an assailant who was armed with a pistol. The
assailant was wounded by Voronenkov’s bodyguard and later died in
hospital, police said. Voronenkov fled to
Ukraine last year and was helping the Ukrainian authorities build a treason
case against Yanukovich, Ukraine’s pro-Kremlin former president. Voronenkov had also
spoken out against Russia’s annexation of Crimea in March 2014, although
he voted for the move at the time.

President Petro
Poroshenko said the killing “is an act of state terrorism on the part of Russia,
which (Voronenkov) was forced to leave for political reasons.” “Voronenkov was one of
the main witnesses of Russian aggression against Ukraine and, in
particular, the role of Yanukovich regarding the deployment of Russian
troops to Ukraine.”

Relations between Kiev
and Moscow are at an all-time low after Russia’s annexation of the Crimean
peninsula in March 2014 and the subsequent outbreak of separatist fighting in
Ukraine’s eastern Donbass region that has killed more than 10,000 people. Poroshenko said it was
“no accident” that Voronenkov was shot on the same day as a warehouse storing
tank ammunition was blown up at a Ukrainian military base. Moscow denied any
involvement Voronenkov’s murder … read more:

the groundbreaking
work on “post-truth” was performed by academics, with further contributions
from an extensive roster of middle-class professionals. Left-leaning, self-confessed
liberals, they sought freedom from state-sponsored truth; instead they built a
new form of cognitive confinement – “post-truth”... More than 30 years
ago, academics started to discredit “truth” as one of the “grand narratives”
which clever people could no longer bring themselves to believe in. Instead of
“the truth”, which was to be rejected as naïve and/or repressive, a new
intellectual orthodoxy permitted only “truths” – always plural, frequently
personalised, inevitably relativised.

Under the terms of
this outlook, all claims on truth are relative to the particular person making
them; there is no position outside our own particulars from which to establish
universal truth. This was one of the key tenets of postmodernism,
a concept which first caught on in the 1980s after publication of Jean-Francois
Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report On Knowledge in 1979. In this
respect, for as long as we have been postmodern, we have been setting the scene
for a “post-truth” era.

“Post-truth” has been
announced as the Oxford
Dictionaries’ international word of the year. It is widely associated with
US president-elect Donald
Trump’s extravagantly untruthful assertions and the working-class
people who voted for him nonetheless. But responsibility for the “post-truth”
era lies with the middle-class professionals who prepared the runway for its
recent take-off. Those responsible include academics, journalists, “creatives”
and financial traders; even the centre-left politicians who have now been hit
hard by the rise of the anti-factual.

On November 16, 2016
Oxford Dictionaries announced that “post-truth” had been selected as the word
which, more than any other, reflects “the passing year in language”. It defines
“post-truth” as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which
objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to
emotion and personal belief”.

The word itself can be
traced back as far as 1992, but documented usage increased by 2,000% in 2016 compared to 2015.
As Oxford Dictionaries’ Casper Grathwohl explained:

We first saw the
frequency really spike this year in June with buzz over the Brexit vote and
again in July when Donald Trump secured the Republican presidential nomination. Given that usage of
the term hasn’t shown any signs of slowing down, I wouldn’t be surprised if
post-truth becomes one of the defining words of our time.

Punditry on the
“post-truth era” is often accompanied by a picture either of Donald Trump (for
example, BBC News Online or The
Guardian) or of his supporters (The
Spectator). Although The Spectator article was a rare exception, the
connotations embedded in “post-truth” commentary are normally as follows: “post-truth”
is the product of populism; it is the bastard child of common-touch charlatans
and a rabble ripe for arousal; it is often in blatant disregard of the actualité.

The truth about
post-truth

But this
interpretation blatantly disregards the actual origins of “post-truth”. These
lie neither with those deemed under-educated nor with their new-found
champions. Instead, the groundbreaking work on “post-truth” was performed by
academics, with further contributions from an extensive roster of middle-class
professionals. Left-leaning, self-confessed liberals, they sought freedom from
state-sponsored truth; instead they built a new form of cognitive confinement –
“post-truth”.

More than 30 years
ago, academics started to discredit “truth” as one of the “grand narratives”
which clever people could no longer bring themselves to believe in. Instead of
“the truth”, which was to be rejected as naïve and/or repressive, a new
intellectual orthodoxy permitted only “truths” – always plural, frequently
personalised, inevitably relativised.

Under the terms of
this outlook, all claims on truth are relative to the particular person making
them; there is no position outside our own particulars from which to establish
universal truth. This was one of the key tenets of postmodernism,
a concept which first caught on in the 1980s after publication of Jean-Francois
Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report On Knowledge in 1979. In this
respect, for as long as we have been postmodern, we have been setting the scene
for a “post-truth” era... read more:

Wednesday, March 22, 2017

The modern West has
placed a high premium on the value of equality. Equal rights are enshrined in
law while old hierarchies of nobility and social class have been challenged, if
not completely dismantled. Few would doubt that global society is all the better
for these changes. But hierarchies have not disappeared. Society is still
stratified according to wealth and status in myriad ways.

On the other hand, the
idea of a purely egalitarian world in which there are no hierarchies at all
would appear to be both unrealistic and unattractive. Nobody, on reflection,
would want to eliminate all hierarchies, for we all benefit from the
recognition that some people are more qualified than others to perform certain
roles in society. We prefer to be treated by senior surgeons not medical
students, get financial advice from professionals not interns. Good and
permissible hierarchies are everywhere around us.

Yet hierarchy is an
unfashionable thing to defend or to praise. British government ministers
denounce experts as out of tune with popular feeling; both Donald Trump and
Bernie Sanders built platforms on attacking Washington elites; economists are
blamed for not predicting the 2008 crash; and even the best established
practice of medical experts, such as childhood vaccinations, are treated with
resistance and disbelief. We live in a time when no distinction is drawn
between justified and useful hierarchies on the one hand, and self-interested,
exploitative elites on the other.

As a group, we believe
that clearer thinking about hierarchy and equality is important in business,
politics and public life. We should lift the taboo on discussing what makes for
a good hierarchy. To the extent that hierarchies are inevitable, it is
important to create good ones and avoid those that are pernicious. It is also
important to identify the ways in which useful and good hierarchies support and
foster good forms of equality. When we talk about hierarchies here, we mean
those distinctions and rankings that bring with them clear power differentials.

We are a diverse group
of scholars and thinkers who take substantively different views on many
political and ethical issues. Recently, we engaged in an intensive discussion
of these issues under the aegis of the Berggruen Philosophy and Culture Center
in Los Angeles, and we found ourselves agreeing on this: much can be said in
defence of some kinds of hierarchy. The ideas we present here are at the very
least worthy of more widespread and serious attention. All of this takes on a
new urgency given the turn in world politics towards a populism that often
attacks establishment hierarchies while paradoxically giving authoritarian
power to individuals claiming to speak for ‘the people’.

What then, should be
said in praise of hierarchy? First, bureaucratic
hierarchies can serve democracy. Bureaucracy is even less popular these days
than hierarchy. Yet bureaucratic hierarchies can instantiate crucial democratic
values, such as the rule of law and equal treatment.

There are at least
three ways in which usually hierarchical constitutional institutions can
enhance democracy: by protecting minority rights, and thereby ensuring that the
basic interests of minorities are not lightly discounted by self-interested or
prejudiced majorities; by curbing the power of majority or minority factions to
pass legislation favouring themselves at the expense of the public good; and by
increasing the epistemic resources that are brought to bear on decision-making,
making law and policy more reflective of high-quality deliberation. Hence
democracies can embrace hierarchy because hierarchy can enhance democracy
itself.

Yet in recent decades,
these civic hierarchies have been dismantled and often replaced
with decentralised, competitive markets, all in the name of efficiency.
This makes sense only if efficiency and effectiveness (usually assumed to be
measured in economic terms) are considered the overriding priorities. But if we
make that assumption, we find ourselves giving less weight to values such as
the rule of law, democratic legitimacy or social equality. Hence, we might
sometimes prefer the democratically accountable hierarchies that preserve those
values even over optimal efficiency.

The National
Investigation Agency (NIA) special court in Jaipur today sentenced Devendra
Gupta and Bhavesh Patel to life in jail in the Ajmer blast case. The two were convicted
along with Sunil Joshi on March 6. Joshi died under mysterious circumstances
soon after the bombing, in which three people were killed and 17 others were
injured. The October 11, 2007 blast took place during the month of Ramazan and
targeted the Khwaja Chishti shrine.

On March 6, the court found three of the
accused guilty in the 2007 blast case. Those convicted include Devendra
Gupta, Bhavesh Patel and Sunil Joshi. Both Devendra Gupta and Sunil Joshi
are former Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) pracharaks.

The NIA court found the three men guilty
of conspiracy, planting bombs and inciting religious sentiments. While
Devendra Gupta and Bhavesh Patel have been in judicial custody, Sunil
Joshi had died mysteriously in 2007, soon after the Ajmer bombing.

The National Investigation Agency had
accused Aseemanand of masterminding the blast. The Jaipur court, however,
acquitted Asseemand and others for the lack of evidence. The court also
did not find any involvement of senior RSS functionary Indresh Kumar in
the blast.

The case had witnessed a major twist when
Bhavesh Patel, one of the three men convicted, accused several Congress
leaders, including Digvijaya
Singh and former Home Minister Sushil
Kumar Shinde of pressurising him to name senior RSS leaders,
including current RSS Chief Mohan Bhagwat and senior RSS functionary
Indresh Kumar as being complicit in the blast case. He demanded a judicial
enquiry into his accusations and into the alleged role of Congress leaders
and NIA officers.